A 13-month-old girl has undergone pioneering brain surgery in an attempt to stop her having up to 40 epileptic fits a day.
Surgeons at King's College hospital in London disconnected the left hemisphere of Lorenza Conning-Rowland's brain - the origin of the seizures - from the right in a procedure likened by the medical team to cutting off a forest fire in its tracks.
Before surgery, Lorenza would lose all her memory every time she had a seizure and her learning process would have to start over again. Simple things, such as remembering how to hold up her head, would be instantly forgotten.
Chris Chandler, the consultant neurosurgeon, said: "You can compare what happens to Lorenza to a child using an Etch A Sketch; you draw lines on it and make a drawing and that is how a small child of her age learns.
"The drawings are memory pathways. When she has a seizure it is as if someone has shaken the Etch A Sketch and cleared it.
"All that learning and memory gets wiped out and she has to start again."
He added: "The operation disconnects the side of the brain where the seizures happen so they can't leap across and affect the other side.
"When you have a forest fire raging, sometimes the only way to stop it is to dig a fire break and create a gap so that the fire can't leap across to the other side."
The eight-hour hemispherectomy operation took place on September 10. Lorenza, who has grown at a normal rate, slept for 10 days after the surgery and is only now becoming more alert.
But there have been complications - her sodium and potassium levels dropped dramatically which means the child is attached to numerous tubes as doctors struggle to balance the fluids and hormones in her body.
Apart from one fit soon after the surgery, which is said to be normal, she has had no more seizures.
But Lorenza remains seriously ill and her family does not know how long it will be before she can leave hospital.
Her mother, Alison Conning, a 46-year-old clinical psychologist who has kept a 24-hour vigil beside her bed since the operation, said her daughter's illness had been hard on the rest of her family.
"They have been so good but now they are a bit fed up and they want us to come home," she said.
Ms Conning praised the treatment her daughter had received, in particular from Charles Buchanan, consultant paediatric endocrinologist.
"The surgery is amazing in itself and the help she has got from her endocrinologist has been wonderful. He has monitored her every input and output. He is a very clever man.
"We are privileged; it is quite a rare operation in this country or even in the world."
But she added: "It is too early to say, her recovery has been a little bit unusual.
"We still hope that she will go home one day."
